Rivals snag news uses as top payment gateways hit by RBI breeze

Payment aggregators such as CCAvenue and Pine Labs’ Plural have seen an increase in onboarding of new users and gained more online merchants after top payment gateways like Razorpay, Cashfree Payments, PayU and Paytm paused new sign-ups following regulator’s order and rejection of payment aggregator (PA) licence applications by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) in some cases, at least half a dozen executives told ET.

Indian banks that have their white-label payment processing offerings have also seen a rise in merchant signups, industry executives told ET.

Sources said CCAvenue has seen an 18% jump in new online merchant signups on its platform in the October-December quarter soon after the RBI barred top PAs from onboarding newer merchants.

Pine Labs, which entered the payment gateway space in October 2020 with Plural, has been a strong beneficiary from the pause by rivals, chief executive Amrish Rau told ET.

“Plural’s total monthly onboarding of new merchants has risen three-fold than what we were doing six months back. We are now processing over $1 billion in monthly TPV (total payment value), again a three-fold increase,” Rau told ET. “This is owing to ease of integration through our API-stack with the Setu acquisition and value-services such as invoicing through Qfix.”